Page:The Theory of the Leisure Class.pdf/230

 earlier, Darwinian and Spencerian, terms and concepts were substituted. Under the circumstances, some latitude may be admissible in the use of terms. The word "type" is used loosely, to denote variations of temperament which the ethnologists would perhaps recognise only as trivial variants of the type rather than as distinct ethnic types. Wherever a closer discrimination seems essential to the argument, the effort to make such a closer discrimination will be evident from the context.

The ethnic types of to-day, then, are variants of the primitive racial types. They have suffered some alteration, and have attained some degree of fixity in their altered form, under the discipline of the barbarian culture. The man of the hereditary present is the barbarian variant, servile or aristocratic, of the ethnic elements that constitute him. But this barbarian variant has not attained the highest degree of homogeneity or of stability. The barbarian culture—the predatory and quasi-peaceable cultural stages—though of great absolute duration, has been neither protracted enough nor invariable enough in character to give an extreme fixity of type. Variations from the barbarian human nature occur with some frequency, and these cases of variation are becoming more noticeable to-day, because the conditions of modern life no longer act consistently to repress departures from the barbarian normal. The predatory temperament does not lend itself to all the purposes of modern life, and more especially not to modern industry.

Departures from the human nature of the hereditary